


Why Storms Are Named After People

by RosalindsGhost



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: F/F, F/M, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Korrasami is Canon, Mild Smut, Minor Korra/Mako, Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2019-03-08 15:57:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13461588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RosalindsGhost/pseuds/RosalindsGhost
Summary: "Do not fall in love with people like me. I will take you to museums, and parks, and monuments, and kiss you in every beautiful place so that you can never go back to them without tasting me like blood in your mouth. I will destroy you in the most beautiful way possible. And when I leave you will finally understand why storms are named after people."-Caitlyn Siehl





	Why Storms Are Named After People

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Things We Lost in the Fire](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/353217) by Kanthia. 



Korra feels old: older than time, older than space, older than spirit. In spite of the fact that she can no longer live the lives of those who came before her, she is tired, and ancient. Perhaps because she cannot hear them any more, the ones that came before, she feels she has lived her own life more fully than any Avatar before her, and it has wearied her spirit until she feared she would be spent, used up like a husk, a shell of a person.

She used to believe that there was only one world-ending, all-consuming love for each person, even the Avatar. Each one of her prior lives had either truly loved one person, or loved none at all, as far as she could tell. Even those before her who had kept harems or had lived with more than one lover had seemed to her to be living some kind of mild affection, rather than love. But that was before she understood.

~~

Mako had tried. Their love had been desperate, frantic, and doomed. They met, and parted, and met again; forever drawn to each other, and forever torn asunder. He had gathered her seams together, patching the cracks and fissures where the dark and power bled through, trying to contain her within her own shell.

Korra could not be contained. She was a tempest; her spirit soared on the winds of a typhoon. She thundered and crackled with ozone, plasma, and fire.

(Asami was the eye of the storm.)

~~

She used to believe that there was only one love. That was before she realized that the Avatar was the essence of love. If people were as numerous as the stars in the sky, the Avatar would never suffer from a scarcity of love to give. Korra’s love was water in the drought, food in the famine, plenty during times of scarcity.

Of course, she also had the capacity to hate, but even within that hatred she could find love. 

In the long, long life she had lived, she had learned that much. 

She felt the first inkling of understanding when she gave Mako up. She knew her love would consume his fire, and she would never forgive herself if that happened. She started to grasp her true capacity for vast love when she was able to face Zaheer again, and look past her anger and fear. That her love was fathoms deep, inestimable, boundless, and immeasurable was finally clear when she saved Kuvira and forgave her sins.

~~

In the days with Mako, she sometimes felt she would fly apart, fracture into her composite pieces. And though he eventually learned to read her body, notice the signs when muscles shook or tensed, (she would still forget, then, and become someone else for a time), he would have to ride out the confusion with as much affection and understanding as he could muster. 

(But he had cried when she lost control. She slipped into the Avatar state and dominated him, becoming an ancient Fire Nation Avatar who had never come to terms with his attraction for other men. Afterward, she had held him as he wept, and begged his forgiveness brokenly.)

Yet later, with Asami, she almost missed the sexual freedom of being able to slip in and out of personas and desires and genders.

~~

Love became the only thing that kept Korra going. 

She was primeval, and the purpose that drove her continued existence was the motivation to bring her love to the world. 

Asami was the catalyst. 

Instead of trying to keep Korra contained, Asami was release. She stood like a lighthouse in Korra’s storm-tossed seas and let the force of nature unleash around her. She made it her mission to take Korra apart, examine her insides, discover what made her tick, and reassemble her shinier and newer than before. Ever the engineer, Asami turned Korra into the best working version of herself.

When Asami stood by her side, holding her hand and raising her voice in unison with hers, Korra burned so fiercely with love that even the bigots and the extremists had to listen. 

Aang had dreamed of a Republic City that was a pinnacle of tolerance for all nations, benders and non-benders alike. Together, Korra and Asami realized that dream a hundredfold. They became the center of the movement toward tolerance: they taught that love did not recognize gender, race or ability. Korra was love, and love was universal.

~~

She wasn’t certain, but she felt that maybe the reason it worked with Asami and not Mako was because Asami was the first non-bender the Avatar had loved in many centuries (at least, as far as she could remember – she no longer had access to those lives she had lived, those people she had been.) Their love transcended the four elements; their love was pure spirit.

When she had finally let Mako go, Korra was often reminded of a passage she had once read. It was written an age ago by another Avatar. This Avatar had lost control and killed her lover in the midst of a wild passion. It read:

"Do not fall in love with people like me. I will take you to museums, and parks, and monuments, and kiss you in every beautiful place so that you can never go back to them without tasting me like blood in your mouth. I will destroy you in the most beautiful way possible. And when I leave you will finally understand why storms are named after people."

After Asami, Korra no longer remembered it with sadness. Korra was the storm, but Asami was the mountain the weathered it.

**Author's Note:**

> My eternal gratitude to Kanthia, whose story The Things We Lost in the Fire inspired this one. Kanthia was kind enough to let me write a sequel to their incredible story, and I hope I did it justice. If you haven’t read it, do.
> 
> The above quote is from Caitlyn Siehl.


End file.
